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Reading, Dyslexia, Learning Disabilities, and Assorted Miseriesby Renée Fuller
The Reading Readiness Test that I had failed so dismally is used in many schools to determine whether a child is ready to enter first grade. I had taken it in order to find out whether it would be useful to our research project. We needed various tests that would tell us about the cognitive development of special needs children and their readiness to learn. Needless to say, after my experience with the Reading Readiness Test, we did not use it in our research project.
According to the test, I did not have the fundamental skills necessary to be taught to read, and, therefore, was not ready to enter first grade. Fortunately for me, my elementary education predated reading readiness tests and other tests of like ilk. I was spared the label of "learning disabled," or "neurologically impaired," or "dyslexic," etc. Even when, at the age of 12 a standard reading test showed that I could barely read on the second grade level, no one thought of me as disabled. Instead, my homeroom teacher, while showing me the results, whispered (so that the other students wouldn't hear) "You must do something about this."
And I did something about it. That summer I borrowed, one by one, all 30 of the OZ books from our public library. The first book took me three weeks, at a minimum of eight hours a day, to decipher. I was still having trouble telling the letters apart, and word building was an onerous task. But those marvelous OZ adventures made me eager to find the meaning behind the hieroglyphs that composed the words that told the exciting stories. By the end of that summer, and by the time I entered seventh grade, it took me only two days to read an OZ book. I had learned to read!
The Reading Readiness Test had been correct in that learning to read did not come easily for me. What it had not picked up was that I had done something about it. And that something was very different from what the test assumed was necessary for me to know in order to achieve literacy. That was what was so truly astonishing-those assumptions about what you have to know in order to learn to read. It showed that the field of education was unaware of the recent findings in perceptual and developmental psychology. It didn't even know the things I had figured out as a 12-year old.
Instead, the field of education had produced a mushrooming industry that is making its living off the growing percentage of students that are supposedly learning disabled, dyslexic, have attention deficit disorders, are neurologically impaired, or have language processing deficits, etc. The list of disorders has kept expanding as more "experts" attach their names to what is supposedly wrong with an ever-growing number of students having trouble learning to read. Now we have testing experts, teaching experts, special classes, and a ballooning educational budget producing poorer and poor results, and many, many, very unhappy children!
I could so very easily have been one of these unhappy children. Would I have made it to graduate school after having been labeled learning disabled, and after years in special classes which implied that I was not up to par? Would I even have graduated from high school? Might not I have ended up like so many of today's presumed learning disorders a semi-illiterate; or as a boy, drifted into a life of crime, responding with rage at my inability to participate in our information dependent society? One thing is certain, I definitely would have been deprived of those wonderful OZ books.
Appalled at seeing the effects untested assumptions were having on the lives of so many unhappy children, it seemed time for some intervention in the field of education. Why not apply what perceptual and developmental psychology knew about learning, add to that my decade of implicit knowledge gleaned doing psychological research with children, and what I had found out when I taught myself to at the age of 12? That was more than 25 years ago.
Remembering how hard it had been for me to tell the letters apart, how the configurations kept changing with variations in the type, I decided that letter recognition was the first thing that had to be dealt with. There is an obvious way to do that. Simply show the student how all the letters can be made with three basic forms-forms that are so fundamental to the human brain that even newborns recognize them. The basic forms are a circle, a line, and an angle-but it is more fun to call them, a ball, a stick, and a bird.
We found that building the letters once or twice with the three forms did the trick for even the slowest of the slowpokes. After that, the extra slowpokes had no trouble telling the letters apart. Older "dyslexic" students were additionally entertained by being told: "Making the letters in this way, your brain will know which parts of a letter it has to pay attention to, and which parts it can ignore 'cause they're just the doohickeys." Our testing showed that this approach made letter recognition and letter sounding easy not only for students with decades of supposed learning disability, but even for severely retarded students (with IQs below 30) who had been exposed to at least 10 years of academic intervention with specially trained Masters and EdD level teachers and had still not learned most of the alphabet.
As for real reading, that meant phonics of courage. But that also meant, as I had found out at the age of 12 with my excursions into the OZ books, there had to be immediate immersion in story reading along with the phonics. Knowing that drill had not worked for me, and knowing how poor human memory is for things out of context, word building should begin as soon as the student has two letters. The stories start with the presentation of the fourth letter. In that way, the letter configurations and sounds can become anchored in memory through immediate usage within the context of a story.
With respect to word building- that important skill of combining letter sounds to make words-I remember the simple technique I had taught myself while deciphering the OZ books. Instead of complicated approaches that teach whole words, or take words apart and then try to teach word components, you simply start with the first-letter sound to which is added the second-letter sound. Then to the combined sounds of one and two, the third-letter sound is added producing a three-letter combo to which the fourth-letter sound is attached, etc. Using this approach, the student has to remember only two things at the same time. Frequently, by the third-letter sound, the student, who is eagerly reading a story, can figure out what the word must be. Actually that is what you, who are reading this, do all the time. We have lots of research with tachistoscopic eye movements that show this to be the case. The technique is such an obvious, simple approach to word building; which makes it all the more puzzling why the more complicated "word attack" skills are taught.
But how do you achieve proficiency without practice (drill)? I knew from my own experience what sieve brains some of us can be. That's why I made practice (drill) inherent to the system. If the student hasn't learned a letter or a reading principle the first time round, that's all right. Because all the important reading principles (like the alphabet) will be repeated again and again, each time within the context of another goofy science fiction adventure. There were many more innovations, especially ones having to do with language (developmental linguistics) and making story reading easier (layout in story-engram form). I thought of these innovations as merely ancillary-not terribly important. But I was so wrong, as became obvious almost immediately.
The teaching system worked! All the "dyslexic" and "learning disabled" students learned to read with surprising speed. Their "learning disability" and/or "dyslexia" vanished, it ceased to exist. When the system was placed in kindergarten classes or first grade, all the children learned to read, and rapidly moved to advanced levels. And they had such a good time learning! Again, there wasn't a single case of dyslexia. The results were gratifying. But since eliminating dyslexia had been the purpose of the system's design, the results merely lived up to expectation.
Then the unexpected happened. We expanded the types of students exposed to the system and it did things that no one dreamed a learning system could do. It taught reading to students with IQs as low as 20. Everyone knows that that should have been impossible. How can people who have almost no language, and the ability to speak no more than half a dozen words, learn to read with comprehension? But they did, and in the process their communication skills and vocabulary exploded. Oddly enough, in spite of their expanding ability to relate verbally and socially, their IQs rose by only a few points. The rise was statistically significant, but not enough to fit intelligence theory. We reported our results at several symposia of the American Psychological Association because of their profound implications for IQ and intelligence testing. The discussion and results appeared in book form under the title In search of the IQ correlation.
I was thoroughly confused by our wonderful results. It was the students who laboriously, because I was a little slow in the head, explained. Pointing to the language innovations (the layout in story engram form), and describing the developmental linguistics, they explained in various ways "This helps you think." Gradually it dawned on me. Of course. To make story reading easier, I had mimicked the language development of the child, building up my stories the same way. By doing so, I had inadvertently shown how the language game is played; which explained why the reading system (although never intending to) had taught how words are combined to help us think.
And that's why those ancillary innovations, the ones I had thought were so unimportant, merely fun, were an open sesame. These innovations play the game of how nouns and verbs are combined to build story essentials. The story essentials (story engrams) are then used as building blocks for the bigger story.
The ease and pleasure the reading innovations have brought to so many children, regardless of supposed disability or IQ, make one wonder whether we humans weren't designed to be readers. All that struggle, all that effort, and frequent suffering just aren't necessary. We can introduce our children to mankind's marvelous invention, literacy, with a wonderful sense of sharing. It is our legacy to them. There's no need for unhappy children. All the letters of the alphabet can be configured with the ball, stick, bird pattern for easy recognition.
Dr. Renée Fuller, Ph.D., received her MA in experimental psychology from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in physiological psychology from New York University. One of her experimental programs dealt with the cognitive changes following Ball-Stick-Bird intervention. For this work she received Fairleigh Dickinson University's Distinguished Achievement Award. At present she is continuing her work in developing learning programs and is consultant to numerous school systems, universities, departments of education, and other organizations.
To learn more about Renée Fuller and Ball-Stick-Bird, go to The Ball-Stick-Bird Publications website at: http://www.ballstickbird.com or write to her at:
Ball-Stick-Bird Publications
PO Box 429, Williamstown, MA 01267telephone: (413) 664-0002
e-mail: info@ballstickbird.com
This article is in the public domain and can be freely copied and used in trainings as handouts at parent and community meetings, and in creating your school or district programs. (Please cite all sources of materials you use.)
This information is provided by:
Office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Special Education
P O Box 47200
Olympia, WA 98504-7200
(360) 725-6088
Fax (360)586-1631
E-mail: dgill@ospi.wednet.edu
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